Participatory justice - Part 1: Domination and oppression
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
This is the fifth in a series about social justice in education - complete blog list below
Previous blogs in the series have discussed social justice as fairness, as redistribution of resources, and as recognition of cultural diversity. This blog is about participatory justice. Broadly speaking, participatory justice concerns our ability (or freedom and opportunity in the language of the capability approach), to take part meaningfully and fully in matters of interest to us and in decisions that affect us. Specifically, the blog draws on the writings of Iris Marion Young, who links justice with the politics of difference, inclusion and deliberation. Part 1 focuses on the injustices of domination and oppression which, according to Young, are the major barriers to participation in institutional and social life. Part 2 is about how to begin to remedy these injustices through processes and relationships of inclusion and representation.
In education, the concept of participatory justice as developed by Young resonates, for example, with Laura Lundy’s child rights-based critique of the enthusiasm for ‘pupil voice’ in compulsory schooling. Lundy argues that ‘voice is not enough’ to give full effect to the intent of Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children need institutional spaces in which to articulate their views. Voice and space together give effect to children’s right to express a view. Children also need an audience and for their views to have real influence in decision-making. Together, audience and influence give effect to their right to have their views given due weight.
Young’s analysis draws our attention to the inherently political nature of these and other institutional processes and relationships when viewed from a participatory justice stance. When she writes of the political, however, Young means much more than party political manifestos and policies, and a representative parliamentary democracy like ours. Rather, her view of the political includes the everyday processes and relations through which members of a social institution or community frame and take decisions about how they will live in common. With regard to pupil voice, just like their parents and caregivers in the economy and society at large, some children are far better positioned than others to navigate the (micro)political demands of voice, space, audience and influence in educational settings. So, participatory justice would require us to ensure that all children enjoy fair opportunity to express their views and to have those views given due weight in decisions that affect them.
In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young distinguishes between distributive and participatory dimensions of justice, saying that the former is about ‘having’, while the latter is about ‘doing’ and, consequently, about practical instantiations of power and opportunity. Distributive theories of justice are clearly important, she acknowledges, but in their primary focus on material goods and social positions they often obscure the lived experience of domination and oppression which, Young argues, should be our focal point for conceptualizing and addressing injustice.
Lived experiences are more appropriately conceptualised as matters of process and relationships than as material goods, and are properties of social groups. In this regard, participatory justice concerns whether and to what extent all social groups in an institution, locality, community or polity are equally able, and enabled, to take part in decisions about what they do and how they interact with each other. For Young, groups exist ‘prior’ to individuals, so our personal and social identities are formed in part from the ways we affiliate and associate with some people rather than others. Indeed, we tend to engage with those we consider ‘other’ differently and less assuredly from those we view as ‘us’. Of course, it’s more complicated in daily life not least because we all belong to multiple social groups simultaneously (race, class, gender, pastime, faith, disability for instance).
Today, the term ‘intersectionality’ is commonly used to describe this complexity: how different facets of our identity intersect with each other to produce idiosyncratic experiences of privilege or injustice. And so, those we designate as ‘same’ or ‘other’ shifts and changes over time according to the context we are in. This also means that there can be no ‘common nature’ that all members of a group share. In some social groups we may enjoy considerably greater ability, freedom and opportunity to participate in decision-making processes and relationships than we do in some other groups with which we affiliate or to which we are assigned by others. Individual experiences of educational inclusion and participation will therefore also vary considerably within and across social groups. For example, two children with the same profile of identified ‘additional learning needs’ may participate quite differently in classroom processes and relations because of myriad other personal experiences and attributes they do not have in common. Teaching repertoires therefore need to be responsive to their diverse experiences and attributes if both children are to be enabled to participate fully and fairly in classroom life.
On this reading, we can perhaps see the beginnings of a participatory justice framework for education that allows us to rethink taken-for-granted everyday classroom, staffroom, boardroom and community processes and relations insofar as they promote or constrain meaningful contributions to key decisions by all the members of the community (learners, educators, trustees and families). And, the ways in which such practical participation is facilitated, and barriers to participation mitigated or removed. (See, for example, Michael Apple and James Beane’s case examples of Democratic Schools). These issues cannot be reduced to material redistribution, and they demand more than the moral recognition of individuals. As Young says, participatory justice must also incorporate two institutional value commitments, namely: (i) conditions necessary for the development and exercise of individual capacities; and (ii) conditions of collective communication and cooperation that actively facilitate individual participation in group decision making. Hers is therefore a process-oriented view of society and a pluralistic conception of the good life: ‘As long as the values we appeal to are abstract enough, however, they will not devalue or exclude any particular culture or way of life’. And if compulsory education is not essentially about such value commitments, then what on earth is it for?
Injustice, for Young, is primarily manifested in the forms of oppression and domination. Oppression she defines as institutional constraints on self-development and domination as institutional constraints on self-determination. Young maintains that these two injustices may be understood in terms of decision-making procedures, the division of labour and culture. So far, this may seem quite abstract in relation to practical educational processes but in her definitions of the two terms, the educational relevance of her reading of participatory justice in early learning services, schooling and tertiary education organisations becomes easier to discern. Oppression in education would be defined as systematic institutional processes (such as pedagogy, administration, governance) which prevent some members (students, educators, trustees, families, community members) from learning and using valued skills, or which inhibit their ability to play and communicate or to express views and feelings on the life of the educational setting among others. Domination occurs where members of the educational community are inhibited or prevented from ‘participating in determining their actions or the conditions of their actions’; or where some can determine actions for everyone either directly or because of the structural conditions of the educational institution (for example, supposedly objective assessment and evaluation criteria, and hierarchical decision rights). Because of the very nature of institutionalised state education, such dominating effects are immanent in the classroom among learners and between students and teachers, in the staffroom with professionals, paraprofessionals and volunteers, in the boardroom and in the wider community or neighbourhood.
Oppression is a structural concept, says Young. Against a common understanding of oppression as tyrannical behaviour by an identifiable oppressor, she argues that oppressed groups often experience disadvantage and injustice through ‘the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society’. Most of us would likely claim that the ideal of a state education is liberal and well-intentioned, but many learners and their families from minoritised groups experience those good intentions quite differently and illiberally in practice from those in majority groups. It is systemic and institutional norms, structures and practices that oppress, and often these are unquestioned by those who benefit from them remaining as they are. For Young, then, oppression is the consequence of ‘often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions’. In this context, think, for example, of the frequently puzzled or defensive reactions from some in majority groups when it is suggested to them that the education system exhibits ‘unconscious bias’, is ‘ablist’, or ‘gender blind’ or that it needs to be ‘decolonised’ or that their ‘white fragility’ inhibits discussion of ‘institutional racism’.
There are five ‘faces’ of oppression in Young’s model: (i) Exploitation, for instance the expectation that teacher aides or parents will ‘volunteer’ unpaid hours to support children with additional learning needs; (ii) Marginalisation, such as events, celebrations, publicity and other forms of recognition within the institution that privilege students who exhibit the same, narrow range of officially preferred attributes; (iii) Powerlessness, for example when parents are made to feel they lack the same standing as professionals, or when students have no say in decision-making about their curriculum or classroom organisation; (iv) Cultural imperialism, when dominant groups render the ethnic, gender or social class knowledge and experiences of some groups invisible or of lesser value; and (v), Violence, such as when some members of the community routinely experience physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual inhibition, neglect or harm from others.
In Part 2 of this blog, Young’s proposals for positively addressing the pluralistic, inclusionary, and deliberative imperatives of participatory justice are applied to education.
Links to blog series
Part 1: The dimensions of social justice in education
Part 2a: Fairness in education – Part 1: John Rawls
Part 2b: Fairness in Education – Part 2: Beyond Rawls
Part 3a: Redistributive justice in education – Part 1: Maldistribution
Part 3b: Redistributive justice in education – Part 2: Redistribution
Part 4a: Recognitive justice in education – Part 1: Recognition
Part 4b: Recognitive justice in education Part 2: Disrespect
Bio: John O’Neill researches in the area of critical education policy scholarship. For many years he has been an education spokesperson for Child Poverty Action Group and the Quality Public Education Coalition.